Page II: Government departments have shed their initial reluctance to use open source technologies, but the problem persists -- how do you determine appropriate usage?
According to Web infrastructure manager Avi Miller, compliance was a more critical factor than either cost -- NOIE's shortlist was equally divided between commercial and open-source products -- or other concerns such as security.
-We would have run CP/M on an Amiga if it was the best standards-compliant environment," he says.
While the Federal Government has made it clear that open source is never likely to be a mandated solution, it has increasingly warmed to the theme of open standards. Tony Judge, general manager of the business strategies branch of NOIE, says that guidelines published by the government Information Management Steering Committee were designed to ensure that conformity to standards was considered alongside value for money when purchasing decisions were made.
Of course, value for money is easy to calculate when proprietary alternatives don't exist. The Bureau of Rural Sciences chose an open source solution for its geographic information systems simply because commercial products lacked some facilities. -In terms of applying open source, we've done as well as we have because we've looked for niches where we can fill needs that other products can't," says Antti Roppola from the Bureau.
Whatever core measures are used, government users do face the additional challenge of working within tightly-defined contractual guidelines.
-There's a lot of issues that arise with the interaction of an open source licence and what you have to provide in a government contract," says Peter Bailey from Synod, which used a mixture of open source and proprietary code for a content management system developed for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). -The acceptance of the use of open source components can be an issue."
Legal blues
One of the problem areas for utilising open source is that government contracts modelled on the Government Information Technology and Communications standard include an explicit requirement that products include a warranty and indemnity clauses -- something which is effectively barred by open source licensing approaches such as the General Public Licence (GPL).
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